Jordan Bruce I07 – Open Source and IDS Major Canadian Retail Drugstore’s Prescription For Success Tuesday 3 rd October :15 – 16:15

2 Major Canadian Retail Drugstore's Prescription For Success Migrating to IDS on LINUX SuSe Sles9

3 Jordan Bruce, Sr. Database Administrator 8 Years DBA Experience Former President of Ontario Canada Informix User Group Lead Senior DBA at Canada’s leading retail drugstore Database Administration Experience with IDS, Oracle, and SQL Server Currently Administering over 1000 IDS Instances across Canada for one of the countries largest retailers

4 Case Study of Large Scale IDS 10 Migration: Going From SCO to Open Source Linux What Was Involved With Our Migration of Over 100 Server Sites Performance Gains Achieved With New IDS 10 features

5 Who We Are… Canada’s Largest/Leading Drugstore Group Operating Since ,000 Employees 1000 Retail Drug Stores Nation Wide 7 Billion in Total Revenue for 2005

6 What is our Pharmacy Application? Allows Critical Health Information to be Securely Accessed by Healthcare Professionals In-House Developed J2EE Pharmacy Application GUI Front-End Replaces Old Legacy Pharmacy Application Uses JMS for inter process Communication

7 Factors leading To Migration Slow Performance of Pharmacy Application Insufficient Support on SCO EOL for Current Platform Increased Stability on IDS Simplified Administration on IDS Open Source OS Licensing Cost No further migration from IDS 9.30 on current platform No future support on current platform for Application Server (WebLogic 7.1)

8 Migrating From… OS: SCO OpenUnix 8.0 Also known as Unixware with LKP Hardware: Proliant ML370 G Network: 100Mbps Application Server: BEA Weblogic 7 SP 1 RDBMS: Informix IDS 9.30 UC7

9 Migrating To… OS: SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 (i586) Kernel bigsmp glibc Hardware: IBM e326 AMD 1U Network: 100Mbps Application Server: BEA Weblogic 8.1 SP4 RDBMS: Informix IDS 10.00UC1

10 Improved Performance with IDS IDS UC1 vs 9.30 UC % Configurable Page Size – 34.97% 4kb page size for I/O intensive DBSpaces 16kb page size for temporary DBSpaces Prepared Statement Cache - 16% DS_NONPDQ_QUERY_MEM OPTCOMPIND

11 Query Performance 49% improvement for queries

12 Query Performance ‘ The Data’

13 Application Performance Roughly a ~62% Improvement for Application

14 OS Performance Roughly a ~39% performance gain

15 Ease of Administration External Optimizer Directives Reorganizations Made Simple By Renaming DBSpace Single User Mode

16 Security DBCREATE_PERMISSION Secure Environment Check

17 Increased Stability Uninterrupted Service at all 114 sites across Canada since implementation

18 Higher Availability Point-in-Time Table Restore FAST_RESTART_PHYSLOG and FAST_RESTART_CKPT_FUZZYLOG Online Index Build

19 Benefits Migration from IDS 9.30UC7 to 10.00UC1 – 0 problems Seamless Migration End Users Extremely Pleased With Results No effort required for Stored Procedures / Triggers Weblogic using latest J2EE Standards

20 Discover – In-House Asset Management System Developed using shell scripting, Expect, XML, Java, Informix, JavaScript, PHP, ADOdb for PHP, HTML and CSS. Web Application is hosted on a Linux server using Apache. Store search web interface – provides info by store number Management reports web interface – provides quantified info about all stores

21 Discover – Store Search Screenshot

22 Discover Web – Why use PHP? PHP ( ) – Server-side Scripting Language Obvious Benefits of Open Source - It’s Free Quick Development Platform Independent Plenty of Other Open-Source Tools for PHP that can be Used PHP in Combination with Apache Remove of the Need for an Application Server. Not Forced into OOP If Business Logic is Managed Well by the Database Design, the Application Does Not Need to be Complex for Simple Display/Search Capabilities

23 Discover Web – Why use ADOdb? ADOdb ( ) One of the Fastest Open Source Database Abstraction Library for PHP (and Python). Licensed Using BSD and LGPL. Providing Portability Over a Variety of Databases Such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Interbase, Firebird, Informix, Oracle, MS SQL, Access, DB2, etc. Full PHP5 Support

24 Discover – Sample code using ADOdb ADOdb Database Connection $dbdriver = ‘informix’; $db = ADONewConnection($dbdriver); $db->PConnect($server, $user, $password, $database);

25 Jordan Bruce Session I07 Case Study: Major Canadian Retail Drugstore’s Prescription For Success